As a fire mage, when do I use Fireball? Everything seems to be about instant Pyroblasts and Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames. Maybe an occasional Dragon’s Breath. Is Fireball actually used for anything? Maybe an opener? But hardcasting a Pyroblast does more damage. Only thing I can think of is the Flame Accelerant talent, which I don’t have yet.
I dunno. I feel like I’m missing something, which wouldn’t be surprising since mage is my least played and least understood class.
Outside of CD’s when you are banking Fire Blast charges for combustion.
Fireball until you get heating up then Fire Blast or Pheonix Flames (try not to cap them) for your hot streak.
During your combustion window, you are just spamming FB/PF and Pyro’s and if you don’t have FB/PF charges scorch (or a scorch to keep your 3 stack improved scorch debuff up on a boss at 30% hp or less).
In retail, I’m not sure I even use fireball anymore for the most part, it’s all about instant casts and proc’ing pyro which happens almost everytime, the only time fireball comes in is if I don’t proc pyro, which is a very very rare occasion considering the mob is usually dead before I run out of instant casts.
Your right tgat does sound stupid
Fireball is your filler spell, you only use it when nothing else is available. All caster classes have a spell like that. You will typically not need to resort to using it much if at all while leveling because everything dies quickly. It only comes into play in the end game when you fight elite dungeon/raid mobs and bosses for an extended period of time which means you will have downtimes when no other cooldowns are available. For Fire specifically those instances are even rarer than for most other classes because it is a fast paced, high APM spec.
P.S. It’s not a stupid question, there very rarely are any stupid questions. It isn’t particularly intuitive either if you haven’t played casters in WoW for very long.